Hi guys, first of all I would like to try to get straight to the point and explain the problem that I am having when trying to fix my friend's laptop, since last week. He has already told me that it doesn't have any sort of antivirus software installed.
Okay so I turn the laptop on and Windows seems to start normally. It loads onto the desktop and to my surprise all I see is the mouse cursor and a black screen. I can move the mouse around, but when I right-click nothing happens. I cannot see the taskbar or any icons, nor the background whatsoever, so my first guess is that the explorer.exe process isn't running. When I press Ctrl+Alt+Del the options menu for windows 7 appears normally, and I can click on the task manager and it suddenly appears out of nowhere, but the black screen is still there.
Here is where I sense a problem of malware of some sort, as I can see, the explorer.exe process is running, after waiting around 10 seconds every process seems to end, one by one. They just start dissappearing until the computer logs off and restarts by itself!
The only way I can search for the malware or spyware or virus (I still don't know what's causing this) is by starting the system in Safe Mode. Here I have run a full system scan using malwarebytes portable from a USB and it has successfully found 29 files. Okay, so I removed them from the system and with a lot of optimism I restarted the laptop thinking that the problem after a 2 hour scan would be solved..
Well I was wrong, the black screen is still there, and the processes end one by one, resulting in the computer logging off and restarting over and over.
In Safe Mode I did a manual search through the %TEMP% and %APPDATA% folders and found some random files like this dsfsfsfsfadagtga.exe so I deleted them, but they didn't seem to be causing the problem. Also by typing msconfig and looking at the startup processes i found a similar ghusaddsf.exe program, so I disabled it and deleted it from the harddrive.
Now I'm not so sure what to do next? I've installed HitmanPro onto the USB and CCleaner portable and I'm going to try to see if they can help, and in the meantime I wrote this post with the hope that someone here could help me out by somehow identifying the characteristics of this malware or spyware or virus?
On a sidenote, my friend also told me that the computer was running seriously slower than normal, and that when he opened a website with Google Chrome, a notice came up about the Sifref.!C program, but malwarebytes hasn't found it?
Thanks in advance for reading this post, I hope it meets the forum guidelines as I am new here and any help would be much appreciated.
Okay so I turn the laptop on and Windows seems to start normally. It loads onto the desktop and to my surprise all I see is the mouse cursor and a black screen. I can move the mouse around, but when I right-click nothing happens. I cannot see the taskbar or any icons, nor the background whatsoever, so my first guess is that the explorer.exe process isn't running. When I press Ctrl+Alt+Del the options menu for windows 7 appears normally, and I can click on the task manager and it suddenly appears out of nowhere, but the black screen is still there.
Here is where I sense a problem of malware of some sort, as I can see, the explorer.exe process is running, after waiting around 10 seconds every process seems to end, one by one. They just start dissappearing until the computer logs off and restarts by itself!
The only way I can search for the malware or spyware or virus (I still don't know what's causing this) is by starting the system in Safe Mode. Here I have run a full system scan using malwarebytes portable from a USB and it has successfully found 29 files. Okay, so I removed them from the system and with a lot of optimism I restarted the laptop thinking that the problem after a 2 hour scan would be solved..
Well I was wrong, the black screen is still there, and the processes end one by one, resulting in the computer logging off and restarting over and over.
In Safe Mode I did a manual search through the %TEMP% and %APPDATA% folders and found some random files like this dsfsfsfsfadagtga.exe so I deleted them, but they didn't seem to be causing the problem. Also by typing msconfig and looking at the startup processes i found a similar ghusaddsf.exe program, so I disabled it and deleted it from the harddrive.
Now I'm not so sure what to do next? I've installed HitmanPro onto the USB and CCleaner portable and I'm going to try to see if they can help, and in the meantime I wrote this post with the hope that someone here could help me out by somehow identifying the characteristics of this malware or spyware or virus?
On a sidenote, my friend also told me that the computer was running seriously slower than normal, and that when he opened a website with Google Chrome, a notice came up about the Sifref.!C program, but malwarebytes hasn't found it?
Thanks in advance for reading this post, I hope it meets the forum guidelines as I am new here and any help would be much appreciated.